Before the concept of booting to flash media, devices such as compact flash cards, multi-media cards and secure digital cards were intended for use only in digital cameras, printers, MP3 players and the like. Nevertheless, manufacturers of these types of media have always formatted each unit with a DOS master boot record including a partition table designating an active partition. Because of this, at boot time, basic input-output services (“BIOS”) firmware believes that the flash media is bootable and attempts to boot to the media. But if no system files are present on the media, the boot attempt fails, and the system is halted with an error message to the user such as “operating system not found.”